Tag Archives: health care

Too Much Dependence

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…on the central government in DC.

Sunday’s Wall Street Journal had a piece decrying the problems with getting the Wuhan Virus vaccines “the last mile” into folks’ shoulders. They’re right that that’s a serious problem. Even though the Federal government is behind schedule on getting vaccine doses into the States’ hands, those States have the bulk of those delivered vaccines still in the refrigerators, uninjected—they’re vastly behind schedule.

The States and locals, though, are mischaracterizing the problem. Typical is this:

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Surveillance State

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And it’s not the People’s Republic of China this time. It’s a European ally.

Spain is planning to keep a record of individuals who refuse to receive the coronavirus vaccine, said the country’s minister of health on Monday.

Worse, Salvador Illa, Spain’s Minister of Health says,

The log of people who refuse vaccination will be shared with the country’s “European partners,” but will not be shared with employers or otherwise made public….

Not even simple, ordinary doctor-patient confidentiality matters here. This medical information will be shared around so all of Europe’s governments can participate in a pan-European surveillance state, even though the putative purpose of such surveillance—so that local employers, et al., can take “appropriate” measures—will be blocked.

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Economic Recovery

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What sort of recovery will we have in 2021 with the Wuhan Virus situation under control and, with the release of two vaccines (I’m betting on the come with Moderna as I write on Friday) and others in the nearby pipeline about to stamp the virus into the mud?

Jon Sindreu, in The Wall Street Journal, provided a couple of clues, although he was writing toward a different purpose. This graph of his is my first clue:

He fleshed that out with this:

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Another Reason

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…why neither the People’s Republic of China nor the World Health Organization can be trusted.

Opposition from the Chinese government is preventing participants in a World Health Organization meeting on the Covid-19 pandemic from learning directly about one of the world’s biggest coronavirus success stories.
Taiwan hasn’t recorded a locally transmitted coronavirus infection in about seven months but has been blocked from participating in a virtual gathering this week [last week as this is posted] of the WHO’s 194-member World Health Assembly because of objections from Beijing, which considers the self-ruled island part of its territory.

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Follow the Narrative–I Mean Science

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Here’s some science—the Great Barrington Declaration.

James Freeman, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal column, opened with this:

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this Great Barrington Declaration more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

The declaration says this, in part:

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Likelihoods

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Scott Gottlieb and Yuval Levin had an uproar in their knickers in their Sunday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

The two center their piece on the failure of President Donald Trump, et al., to take precautions satisfactory to Gottlieb and Levin to minimize their chances of getting the Wuhan Virus. The money quote in their piece, though—from my perspective—is this:

For months, some of them condoned nonchalance about the virus, mocking precautions such as wearing masks as marks of weakness and dismissing public-health concerns as overwrought.

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Testing Criteria

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The FDA wants to add new Wuhan Virus vaccine testing criteria to emergency use authorization applications—weeks after several pharma companies’ Phase III trials (the last phase requiring substantial data collection before EUA can be requested, the phase whose satisfactory completion is required before general use authorization can be requested) already have begun.

As part of the new guidelines, manufacturers seeking authorization would have to follow trial participants for at least two months after a second vaccine shot.
The new standards would also reportedly ask developers to identify a specific number of severe COVID-19 cases in patients who received a placebo in trials.

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“Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19”

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That’s the title of a medRxiv preprint (unpeer-reviewed) paper that looked at the risk to adults—in particular, Scottish NHS healthcare workers, NHS-contracted general practice service providers, and members of their households—of contracting the Wuhan Virus (my term) when they lived in households with children with ages ranging from new-born to 11 years old. Total participants numbered more than 300,000 adults and children.

The results are correlative rather than causative, but the strength of the correlation is strongly suggestive.

The risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in those with one child and lower still in those with two or more children….

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Unsafe at any Quickness

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Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn is being asked by some 20 Senators—Republican; no Progressive-Democrat wanted any part of this—to take the abortifacient Mifeprex or mifepristone off the market.

The senators say that based on FDA reporting the drug has resulted in the death of more than 3.7 million unborn children and two dozen pregnant women.
They also said the drug has caused at least 4,195 negative reactions in pregnant women including hemorrhaging, excruciating abdominal pain and severe, life-threatening infections.

The drug is unsafe for a significant fraction of the mothers who take the drug. It’s 100% unsafe for the 3.7 million unborn babies that have been killed with it.

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Panic Over Kern County, California

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Kern County, California, is in serious Wuhan Virus trouble. Or so think some journalists and the State of California.

Residents of the agriculture-rich Central Valley are falling victim to Covid-19 at the highest rates in California….

And

Kern County, which lies in the Central Valley’s southernmost part, had the highest per capita rate of new Covid-19 infections in California between July 31 and Aug. 13, averaging 56.2 new cases per 100,000 people….

Now for some context, using Alejandro Lazo’s—he’s the author of the piece at the link—own numbers.

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